How to Increase Blog Traffic – New Marketing Platforms and Strategies

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When it comes to driving blog traffic, there are many methods professional and everyday bloggers alike use to reach their audience.

Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are incredible marketing tools for bloggers. Considering the reach of these social media platforms, it’s of little surprise that many bloggers often recommend strategies that utilize these platforms to drive blog traffic.

Don’t get me wrong, all of these platforms present an immense amount of opportunity for bloggers and content creators. After reading the Pinterest Strategy Guideby Marina, I think I’m even going to revamp my efforts in the Pinterest marketing department.

However, I think it is also important to always consider unique marketing approaches and to maintain an open mindset.

Not every promotional strategy needs to use traditional channels or cookie-cutter methods. The internet is a dynamic place after all, and you need to stay on your toes!

In fact, my most successful marketing campaigns for my blog This Online Worldhave come from using less prominent platforms.

So, I want to share some ways you can drive traffic to your blog by using fresh marketing strategies that might be new to a lot of bloggers out there.

Quora Blog Marketing – Increasing Blog Traffic with Quora

I’ve covered Quora marketing strategies in depth on my own blog, but I am always eager to write more content about Quora because it is my favorite way to increase blog traffic.

Quora is a question-answer platform that was founded in 2009. On Quora, the community manages almost every aspect of content. People ask questions, industry experts and everyday people chime in, and the best answers are upvoted while poor answers gradually fall to the bottom of a thread.

It’s almost a cross between Yahoo Answers and Reddit.

Quora is also a vast platform, with 190 million active monthly users as of April 2017. Quora even has thousands of question-answer topics, such as writing, music, health, fitness, technology, and finance.

Reddit Blog Marketing – Increasing Blog Traffic with Reddit

“If you want to successfully market on Reddit, you need to make sure you aren’t a marketer.”

That phrase, in general, describes the Reddit landscape incredibly well when it comes to utilizing Reddit to drive blog traffic or promote your business.

Reddit is essentially a massive forum where news and content from around the web are discussed.

Like Quora, Reddit maintains a high standard of quality, and users help moderate content through an upvote/downvote system.

Redditors are also very wary of content that is promoted by businesses or marketers. Content quality, humor, and transparency are generally much more appreciate and well received by the community than someone who is pitching a product or service.

So, when using Reddit to increase blog traffic, you need to be aware of the general Reddiquette (Reddit Etiquette) that exists and refrain from being overly promotional and rigid.

If you want to successfully promote your blog on Reddit, I would suggest doing the following:

Follow subreddits that are related to your blog topic.

Follow subreddits that relate to blogging (like r/Blogging or r/SEO).

Make your Reddit name your blog name, if possible.

Help other Redditors with their questions and provide value (similar to Quora!)

When you discover something interesting that could help other people, share it.

Remain genuine, transparent, and have some fun.

You would be amazed at how many Reddit users will direct message you to ask for additional information or request that you share your blog URL.

My blog is focused on blogging, marketing, and passive income, and I’ve shared tidbits of information with relevant communities along the way:

My referral traffic from Reddit hasn’t been massive, but the traffic is incredibly interested and likely to turn into subscribers/repeat users. Besides, just look at that low bounce rate!

Additionally, sometimes I don’t even link my blog. I just suggest people do some Googling (and I happen to rank very well for some particular niche topics in passive income, so they will find me anyway!)

Reddit is also excellent for building relationships, learning more about your blogging niche, and finding guest posting opportunities or new business partners.

If you want to try a new way to drive traffic to your blog, I would highly suggest becoming active on Reddit.

LinkedIn Blog Marketing – Increasing Blog Traffic with LinkedIn

While LinkedIn is a more recent platform I’m looking to use, it is easy to see the potential LinkedIn has for bloggers.

I mean, just look at some of the potential groups out there! They have thousands of members!

I believe that as long as you follow the same practices as Quora and Reddit (providing value, being transparent, etc.) you can effectively use LinkedIn to promote your blog by sharing content with relevant groups.

As with Quora and Reddit, Medium allows for community members to interact with content by ‘clapping.’ Claps indicate people like your content, and if people clap for your work, there’s a strong likelihood you can spark awareness and even make money.

However, the best part about Medium is that you can import your old blog posts.

Medium allows bloggers to import stories from their blogs on to Medium. This is basically a form of content syndication, and it’s valuable because it pushes your work in front of a new audience.

This tag lets Google know that your blog post is the original, most authoritative source for the content. This ensures that Medium cannot cannibalize your blog traffic using work you created in the first place.

Considering this tag, there is no reason not to import your blog posts to Medium.

Medium receives more than 60 million monthly readers. I don’t know about you, but that’s definitely a larger audience than my blog.

I’ve been republishing blog posts to Medium since April, 2018, and the results haven’t been too terrible:

I’ve also managed to gain almost 50 followers on the platform, just by sharing content I’ve already created:

While it can be hard to track referral traffic from Medium, the platform ultimately allows you to continually build your brand/blog image, reach a new audience, and engage readers who are interested in your niche.

Additionally, you can also earn author bonuses or be paid when premium Medium users clap for your articles:

Ultimately, Medium can be a handy way to gain some additional traction on your work, and it requires minimal effort to import content you have already created!

Some Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, as long as you provide value to your audience and do not overly self-promote, I believe you can successfully market your blog and drive traffic on almost any platform.

Facebook, Pinterest, and other popular platforms are great. I use them every day, and my blog has benefited from me doing so.

However, it can also be rewarding to market your blogs on less saturated platforms that have different audiences. You would be amazed at the relationships you can build and the traffic you can generate just by being helpful to people!

If you’re looking to spice up your marketing mix and try something new, I highly suggest using any of the 4 platforms I have outlined.

Comments

Great article! I personally love using Quora and always ask others to do the same. Unfortunately, I haven’t been active recently on it. However, and that’s the good part, my answers are still getting hundreds of views every week, and many of them visit my blog and subscribe to my list. It just goes to show that worthwhile answers on Quora will always get the best treatment from readers as well as their algorithm.

Thank you for this great post. I’m definitely going to check out reddit and medium for more traffic sources!

With SEO getting difficult, internet marketing professionals have shifted to SMO (social media optimization). Quora is one of the stable platforms for Q&A after Yahoo Q&A so far with personal experience as well as to generate massive traffic. It is the most reliable technique to drive traffic to the blog. Quora is the future of content marketing. It’s the place to be for all kind of users who like to write. And it’s a great way to pull traffic for your site.

I am learning about Digital Marketing especially for my blog promotion, and I found that this Quora will be a better option to get traffic on my website. With Quora, you just need to re-iterate, preferring the right questions to answer a valid strategy. The question and answer should add content and present some specific direction to the reader about their living, career or work. Your answers should show that you are well educated on that subject you are discussing.

Moreover, Quora is the best platform not only to generate traffic but also get the idea about the real world problem people are looking to solve, and you can solve them by publishing your next articles.

Amazing post, I’m thrilled! It’s really different from the most usual gain traffic posts. However, I always fail to promote on Reddit no matter how helpful I am. Once they see to link your blog Redditors become so mean !

Thanks for sharing the resources. I second your points as I also use them for content marketing. I found a few points missing in your article like optimization of meta tags according to potential keywords, blogger outreach, etc.

I have a question specifically about Medium. How does it exactly drive traffic to your own blog? It seems like the process is reposting your post on a different platform other than your blog, but how does that increase your blog traffic? Does it redirect readers to your blog site or if you Medium page is popular enough, readers may go to your blog site?

Hi Jessica, Tom here (the author of this post). Great question! There are a few ways Medium can drive people back to your blog.

Firstly, if your article interlinks to other articles on your blog, people may naturally click these links and be redirected back.

Secondly, you can also add a ‘originally published on http://www.mywebsite.com‘ or whatever sort of link you want at the top and bottom of your article to ensure readers know it is syndicated.

Finally, you can just flat out ask or encourage people to check out your own website via your Medium Profile bio, which is definitely a freebie for gaining some traffic. If a story goes viral you can definitely see a decent number of visitors trickle back to your website from my experience!